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Books > History > African history > General
This book is about Angolan literature and culture. It investigates a segment of Angolan history and literature, with which even Portuguese-speaking readers are generally not familiar. Its main purpose is to define the features and the literary production of the so-called 'creole elite', as well as its contribution to the early manifestations of dissatisfaction towards colonial rule patent during a period of renewed Portuguese commitment to its African colonies, but also of unrealised ambitions, economic crisis, and socio-political upheaval in Angola and in Portugal itself. Nineteenth-century Angolan society was characterised by the presence of a semi-urbanised commercial and administrative elite of Portuguese-speaking creole families--white, black, some of mixed race, some Catholic and others Protestant, some old established and others cosmopolitan--who were based in the main coastal towns. As well as their wealth, derived from the functions performed in the colonial administrative, commercial and customs apparatus, their European-influenced culture and habits clearly distinguished them from the broad native population of black peasants and farm workers. In order to expand its control over the region, Portugal desperately needed the support of this kind of non-coloniser urban elite, which was also used as an assimilating force, or better as a source of dissemination of a relevant model of social behaviour. Thus, until the 1850s great creole merchants and inland chiefs dealt in captive slaves, bound for export to Brazil via Cape Verde and Sao Tome: the tribal aristocracy and the creole bourgeoisie thrived on the profits of overseas trade and lived in style, consuming imported alcoholic beverages and wearing European clothes. After the abolition, however, their social and economic position was eroded by an influx of petty merchants and bureaucrats from Portugal who wished to grasp the commercial and employment opportunities created by a new and modern colonial order, anxious to keep up with other European colonial powers engaged in the partition of the African continent. This book thus considers the first intellectuals, the early printed publications in the country, and the pioneers of Angolan literature who felt the need to raise their roots to higher dignity. Thus, they wrote grammar, dictionaries, poetry, fiction, and of course, incendiary articles denouncing exploitation, racism, and the different treatment afforded by the colonial authorities to Portuguese expatriates and natives.
Although British-born, John Allen lived in South Africa from 1954 to 1990, a 36-year period during which the country experienced its most climactic--and sometimes terrible--events. Speaking from firsthand knowledge and with an intimate understanding of the situation, the author takes us beyond the media hype that so dominated Western television screens to answer some of the most vital questions concerning the apartheid era:
Apartheid South Africa addresses these and a host of other issues, bringing to light little-known facts concerning historical detail and providing the reader with eyewitness accounts of day-to-day life in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
The primary objective of this book is to understand the nature of the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria. Boko Haram's goal of an Islamic Caliphate, starting in the Borno State in the North East that will eventually cover the areas of the former Kanem-Borno Empire, is a rejection of the modern state system forced on it by the West. The central theme of this volume examines the relationship between the failure of the state-building project in Nigeria and the outbreak and nature of insurgency. At the heart of the Boko Haram phenomenon is a country racked with cleavages, making it hard for Nigeria to cohere as a modern state. Part I introduces this theme and places the Boko Haram insurgency in a historical context. There are, however, multiple cleavages in Nigeria ethnic, regional, cultural, and religious and Part II examines the different state-society dynamics fuelling the conflict. Political grievances are common to every society; however, what gives Boko Haram the space to express such grievances through violence? Importantly, this volume demonstrates that the insurgency is, in fact, a reflection of the hollowness within Nigeria's overall security. Part III looks at the responses to Boko Haram by Nigeria, neighbouring states, and external actors. For Western actors, Boko Haram is seen as part of the "global war on terror" and the fact that it has pledged allegiance to ISIS encourages this framing. However, as the chapters here discuss, this is an over-simplification of Boko Haram and the West needs to address the multiple dimension of Boko Haram. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, insurgencies, African politics, war and conflict studies, and IR in general.
Although Apollonius of Rhodes' extraordinary epic poem on the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece has begun to get the attention it deserves, it still is not well known to many readers and scholars. This book explores the poem's relation to the conditions of its writing in third century BCE Alexandria, where a multicultural environment transformed the Greeks' understanding of themselves and the world. Apollonius uses the resources of the imagination - the myth of the Argonauts' voyage and their encounters with other peoples - to probe the expanded possibilities and the anxieties opened up when definitions of Hellenism and boundaries between Greeks and others were exposed to question. Central to this concern with definitions is the poem's representation of space. Thalmann uses spatial theories from cultural geography and anthropology to argue that the Argo's itinerary defines space from a Greek perspective that is at the same time qualified. Its limits are exposed, and the signs with which the Argonauts mark space by their passage preserve the stories of their complex interactions with non-Greeks. The book closely considers many episodes in the narrative with regard to the Argonauts' redefinition of space and the implications of their actions for the Greeks' situation in Egypt, and it ends by considering Alexandria itself as a space that accommodated both Greek and Egyptian cultures.
This fascinating book, originally published in 1971, had it origins in daily journalism: a series of feature articles for the Pretoria News written between 1968 and 1970. Since then much has changed and that era now seems as remote as Kruger’s did in 1970. The original text is reprinted here with minimal editing. Though happily some still survive, many of the buildings pictured in this book have disappeared, such as the old Town Hall and the first Opera House. Gone too are many of the original pictures, some burnt in the fire that destroyed the main part of Munitoria and the city’s priceless archive. Kruger’s Pretoria provides the memory of a town long gone.
During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, they were expected to turn out works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost. This book documents the extraordinary energy of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West became instruments - whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not - of America's secret service.
"This is the first book-length study of the French Caribbean presence in Africa, and serves as a unique contribution to the field of African Diaspora and Colonial studies. By using administrative records, newspapers, and interviews, it explores the French Caribbean presence in the colonial administration in Africa before World War II"--Provided by publisher.
Telling a new story of modern Egypt, Mohammad Salama uses textual and cinematic sources to construct a clear and accessible narrative of the dynamics of Islam and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The conflict between tradition and secular values in modern Egypt is shown in a stimulating and challenging new light as Salama bridges analysis of nationalism and its connection to Islamism, and outlines the effects of secular education versus traditional Islamic teaching on varied elements of Egyptian society. These include cultural production, politics, economic, identity, and gender relations. All of this helps to discern the harbingers that led to Egypt's social transition from the monarchy to the republic and opens the possibility of Islam as an inspiring and inspirational force. This illuminating, provocative and informative study will be of use to anyone interested in the period, whether general readers, students, or researchers.
The Ibadi Muslims, a little-known minority community, have lived in North Africa for over a thousand years. Combining an analysis of Arabic manuscripts with digital tools used in network analysis, Paul M. Love, Jr takes readers on a journey across the Maghrib and beyond as he traces the paths of a group of manuscripts and the Ibadi scholars who used them. Ibadi scholars of the Middle Period (eleventh-sixteenth century) wrote a series of collective biographies (prosopographies), which together constructed a cumulative tradition that connected Ibadi Muslims from across time and space, bringing them together into a 'written network'. From the Mzab valley in Algeria to the island of Jerba in Tunisia, from the Jebel Nafusa in Libya to the bustling metropolis of early-modern Cairo, this book shows how people and books worked in tandem to construct and maintain an Ibadi Muslim tradition in the Maghrib.
How did Tunisia succeed in eliminating the threat of militant Islamic fundamentalism? Borowiec examines the actions, which begin with the removal of the senile President Habib Bourguiba in 1987, known in Tunisia as the change. Today, while its next door neighbor, Algeria, is in the midst of an upheaval threatening modernization and a secular government, Tunisia is the only Muslim country to ban polygamy and to introduce state-funded contraception. Borowiec begins by sketching Tunisia's history from the Phoenician era onward. He provides a detailed analysis of the country's Islamic movement, and then examines the efforts of Bourguiba's successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to liberalize the economy, foster a Western orientation, and make education accessible to all. Interviews with leading government officials as well as educators, writers, and average Tunisians puts a human face on a process that may allow Tunisia to make the transition to become a young developed nation at the beginning of the next millennium. This book is important to scholars, researchers, and the general public concerned with events in North Africa and the Arab world.
When the Anglo-Boer War began at the end of 1899, Germans protested profusely. Everybody, from the Conservatives to the Social Democrats took a united stand against the "arch enemy", Britain, and her war in the South of Africa. Only when the South African Union was founded in 1910 did the German public interest in South Africa decrease. This interest left a great number of German publications, which is a reminder of the fact that the general public of the German Reich supported, with great interest, an important world historic event overseas, which remains unprecedented in its intensity and extent.
African research played a major role in transforming the discipline of anthropology in the twentieth century. Ethnographic studies, in turn, had significant effects on the way imperial powers in Africa approached subject peoples. Ordering Africa provides the first comparative history of these processes. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers, the transnational features of knowledge production, and the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration, this volume both consolidates and extends a range of new research questions focusing on the politics of imperial knowledge. Specific chapters examine French West Africa, the Belgian and French Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Italian Northeast Africa, Kenya, and Equatorial Africa (Gabon) as well as developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. A major collection of essays that will be welcomed by scholars interested in imperial history and the history of Africa. -- .
This book takes as its theme the ways in which governments legitimate their rule, both to themselves and to their subjects. Its introduction explores legitimacy and pre-colonial states, but the three sections of the book deal with colonial legitimacy, the question of legitimation in the transition from colonialism to majority rule, and the contemporary debate about accountability.
Victims of political persecution since 2000, Zimbabwe's whites have never overcome the problem of belonging. In North America and Australia, Europeans became the majority and "normal" partially through the genocide of native peoples. Settlers to Zimbabwe, however, only comprised a tiny minority. They monopolized the territory but struggled to assimilate culturally. Rather than integrating with African societies, many adopted a strategy of social escape. In this arresting and powerful study, David McDermott Hughes shows how they became emotionally and artistically invested in the non-human environment surrounding them. He traces how writers, artists, and farmers crafted a white identity focused on ecological conservation and how, emerging from state terror, some are now groping toward a whiteness of uncommon humanity and humility.
The Women of Cairo: Scenes of Life in the Orient, first published in 1929, describes the trip to Egypt and other locations in the Ottoman Empire taken by French Romanticist Gerard de Nerval. The book focuses on both reinforcing and dispelling the old ways in which people saw the Orient, as well as examining their old and new customs. This book is perfect for those studying history and travel.
"A strength of the volume is its coverage of the "applied" aspects of knowledge, from Anthropology through to Eugenics and state and social planning. There is also a commendable sensitivity to the unique ethnic dynamics of southern Africa, not least, for example, the complications of an "indigenized" and powerful Afrikaner nationalism." Donal Lowry, Oxford Brookes University This collection, dealing with case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Mauritius, examines the relationship between scientific claims and practices on the one hand and the exercise of colonial power on the other. It challenges conventional views that portray science as a detached mode of reasoning with the capacity to confer benefits in a more or less even-handed manner. That science has the potential to further the collective good is not fundamentally at issue, but science can also be seen as complicit in processes of colonial domination. Not only did science assist in bolstering aspects of colonial power and exploitation, it also possessed a significant ideological component: it offered a means of legitimating colonial authority by counter-poising Western rationality to native superstition and it served to enhance the self-image of colonial or settler elites in important respects. This innovative volume ranges broadly through topics such as statistics, medicine, eugenics, agriculture, entomology and botany. Its interdisciplinary approach will find a readership amongst historians, sociologists, anthropologists and historians of science and medicine, both at an undergraduate and at a specialist level. Contributions are drawn from South Africa, Britain and North America.
The book examines South African history and society from a variety of comparative perspectives. It brings together work by scholars based in South Africa, USA and the UK to reflect on the nature and evolution of what was considered for a long time a unique society. Drawing on studies of social, political and intellectual processes elsewhere, the authors seek to place South African developments in a broader context that sheds light on their specific features as well as global relevance.
The Algerian War 1954-62 was one of the most prolonged and violent examples of decolonization. Bringing to an end 132 years of French rule, the Algerian struggle caused the fall of six French prime ministers, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and expulsion of one million French settlers. This volume, bringing together leading experts in the field, focuses on one of the key actors in the drama - the French army. They show that the Algerian War was just as much about conflicts of ideas, beliefs and loyalties as it was about simple military operations. In this way, the collection goes beyond polemic and recrimination to explore the many and varied nuances of what was one of the historically most important of the grand style colonial wars.
The French North African Crisis analyzes the postwar breakdown in French imperial rule in North West Africa, concentrating primarily upon the Algerian war of independence. This book highlights the human tragedy involved and the divisive consequences within French metropolitan politics of intractable colonial conflict. It further examines how far the protracted crisis of colonial control in North Africa shaped French foreign and security policy and this impacted upon Anglo-French relations, the western alliance and the wider process of decolonization.
When Peterhouse School opened in 1955, the British Empire in Africa was still intact and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had just come into being. It was a boarding school founded on the British model, but with the intention that it would 'adapt all that is best in the Public School tradition to African conditions'. The story of Peterhouse is not only about work and sport, music and drama, chapel and syllabus changes. It is set in the context of educational development and political changes in a Southern Africa country. The school became a pioneering multi-racial institution in 'white Rhodesia'; shared the sufferings of the country during the 'bush war'; expanded greatly in the new Zimbabwe, survived the contradictions of a black 'Marxist' government, and has kept its firm commitment to being a 'Church School'. Despite the uncertainties and challenges of the new century, this is a story of faith and vision.
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